Technology leaders favor online ID card over passwords

By eSchool News

June 24th, 2008

Microsoft, Google, and PayPal, a unit of eBay, are among the founders of an industry organization that hopes to solve the problem of password overload among computer users, the New York Times reports. The Information Card Foundation is an effort to create a single, industry-wide approach to managing identity online that promises to reduce the use of passwords and create a system that is less vulnerable to fraud. "There is such a market requirement to solve this problem," said Paul Trevithick, chairman of the new group and chief executive of Parity, an identity-protection technology company in Needham, Mass., that is developing what it calls an i-card. The foundation, which also includes Equifax, Novell, Oracle, and nine industry analysts and technology leaders, will try to set open standards for the technology industry. The idea is to bring the concept of an identity card, like a driver’s license, to the online world. Rather than logging on to sites with user IDs and passwords, people will gain access to sites using a secure digital identity that is overseen by a third party. The user controls the information in a secure place and transmits only the data that is necessary to access a web site…